The argument against God’s existence from evil comes in a few forms. The most reasonable form was given by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica in the 1200s.

It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

This rests on a misunderstanding of evil, seeing evil as a positive thing rather than a privation of good that only appears to exist in the same way that shadows appear to exist. That’s not immediately obvious about evil, so this form is not stupid.

The simpler answer, btw, is that God permits evil so as to bring about greater good from it, or as Saint Thomas said:

As Augustine says (Enchiridion xi): “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.

This form of the argument from evil is reasonable because it depends on a kind of ignorance which a reasonable person may have. That is, reasonable people may make this argument. The thing is, once answered, because they are reasonable and merely lacked some knowledge necessary to understand, once answered (well), they are intellectually satisfied and stop bring forth this argument.

This is like the people who have not heard the evidence that the earth is spinning on its axis and orbiting about the sun, and who naturally assume the earth to be stationary and the sun to be moving around the earth because this is the evidence of their senses. It is a reasonable conclusion given their limited knowledge but once their knowledge is expanded, they stop making the argument.

Then we come to the argument from evil as one tends to encounter it today.

This takes on quite a lot of forms, often from the same person. I’m only going to present one example since they all amount to the same thing, and as the ancient saying goes, one does not need to drink the whole sea to know that it is salt.

If a human father allowed his child to die when he had the power to save him, we would say that he is evil. Since God is omnipotent he could stop all death, so if you didn’t give God a special exception, you would admit that he is evil. Therefore God is either not good or does not exist.

To state the obvious (since atheists do occasionally read my blog posts) this argument rests on an obvious category error, as well as a misunderstanding of human fathers.

To briefly address the first, God is not a human father, and is only our Heavenly Father by analogy to a human father. As you can see from the argument from contingency and necessity, God is the ground of our being. His relationship is in some ways more analogous to that of an author to the characters in his novel than it is to a human father. (NOTE: I am not criticizing the metaphor that God himself gave us, I’m only noting that that’s a general analogy and that, for the purposes of this particular narrow concern that it was not meant for, it is less illuminating.) A human father is another creature in the same time and space as his child. God creates time and space as well as the human beings in it. This is why he is omnipotent and omniscent, but also why his violations of the rules which govern us do not violate their spirit. Rules are abstractions meant to enable finite creatures to navigate a world which is too complex for them. God fulfills the spirit of the rules—goodness—without being limited to the abstractions because his complete knowledge and ability to handle it all enables him to do so. Embedded within all human ethics—for those who take some trouble to try to understand human ethics—is the fact of our necessarily limited knowledge.

But the difference is still greater.

We are finite beings, which means that what we are given is finite. It is no harm to us to not give us more than we are given, since we are owed nothing. Every moment we are given is a gift. Humans are not to try to cut that short (except for a variety of justified exceptions) because it is the gift of God, not the gift of humans, and so we have no right to try to limit the gift of God. The existence God gives to people is His gift, however, which gives him the perfect right to limit it to whatever finite quantity of generosity His wisdom decides is good.

(There will be atheists who will take this as an occasion to complain that they were given more than they deserved but they feel like they deserve infinitely much. These are just bad people who are pouring forth badness out of the store of badness in their hearts. There is no possible defense for a person who received a gift—that is, something he did nothing to deserve—complaining that he wanted a bigger gift.)

There are still further differences which are pretty obvious yet these atheists seem completely oblivious to them. We, because of our limited vision, see the death of a person as the end of that person. God, outside of time, necessarily sees it as a transition to the afterlife. From God’s perspective it’s far more like when a kid graduates college and gets a job—one phase of their life is over but the next has begun.

There’s more, but I think that suffices for my point. The other thing is that there are times when a loving father must let his son die when he could stop it. A simple example is when the son can go on a mission that will certainly result in his death but which will enable him to save many other people. The father could sabotage the son’s vehicle and save his life, or drug his food and save his life, but he would be a bad father to do this.

An atheist who saw that would, no doubt, scream about how maybe a father should do that—actually, though, these days I don’t trust them to have even that much moral sense, so it’s not a given—but that God is omnipotent so he could just save the people himself or whatever.

Which brings us to the point. Whatever exactly is going on here, it’s not thinking. They are not considering the things that they are saying as ideas, it’s all just fragments of ideas as a means to an end. It may just be a complaint that they don’t understand and will not trust. It may be something else. But whatever it is, it’s not anything like a coherent train of thought meant to get at truth.

I don’t know what such people need. Probably what they need more than anything is to repent, which we can’t do for them. Probably also to forgive their parents, though that could easily be related to the repentance. Holding onto the harms others have done us tends to be wrapped up in holding on our own evil. This, again, isn’t something we can do for them. Beyond that, my guess is that they need a good friend who will be there for them in bad times as well as good, and for a good long time. This can’t be done over the internet.

So about all I can think of is to pray for them. That’s really obvious, of course, but it does no harm to repeat it.

Lord, have mercy on them, and us.